Maybe I'm an old fashioned has-been but people doign software development should understand the fundamentals of how computers work. That means that they should understand things like memor management, they should understand what a pointer is, they should undertsand about how tight loops versus unrolled loops might affect the performance of the caches on their system. I meet so many "programmers" that have no understanding that there are architectural constraints on what they can and can't do. Software runs on hardware. If you're going to write software and treat the hardware as a black box, you're not going to write it as well, or as efficiently as you could be doing it.
You create a binary only, non-GPL driver and only provide it as a module in your device's filesystem that gets immediatelly loaded by your custom init scripts.
If this driver is needed before your userland can fully initialize (for example, it's a custom disk device...ICK), stuff it into an initrd, boot from initrd, load the driver,and then pivot_root over to the real userland and run your init.
As of today, non-GPL binary only driver modules are perfectly acceptable. As long as you do not directly link into the static kernel binary, you do not have to GPL your driver. No legal issues at all.
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Maybe I'm an old fashioned has-been but people doign software development should understand the fundamentals of how computers work. That means that they should understand things like memor management, they should understand what a pointer is, they should undertsand about how tight loops versus unrolled loops might affect the performance of the caches on their system. I meet so many "programmers" that have no understanding that there are architectural constraints on what they can and can't do. Software runs on hardware. If you're going to write software and treat the hardware as a black box, you're not going to write it as well, or as efficiently as you could be doing it.
This is a really simple problem to solve.
You create a binary only, non-GPL driver and only
provide it as a module in your device's filesystem that gets immediatelly loaded by your custom init scripts.
If this driver is needed before your userland can fully initialize (for example, it's a custom disk device...ICK), stuff it into an initrd, boot from initrd, load the driver,and then pivot_root over to the real userland and run your init.
As of today, non-GPL binary only driver modules are perfectly acceptable. As long as you do not directly link into the static kernel binary, you do not have to GPL your driver. No legal issues at all.